Reviews and Features

James Sutherland-Smith Poetry Belgrade

Edwin Morgan has observed that he considers himself to be a Glasgow poet, that he doesn’t mind being described as a Scots poet, but that he objects strongly to being labelled a British poet. This is an example of a poet positioning himself as parochial rather than provincial to make use of Seamus Heaney’s distinction. Nowadays poets in the British Isles and Ireland eagerly take possession of a particular parish all of their own whether it is a geographical location in the Shetlands or a placement in an occupational institution such as a lawyer’s office or a hospital. The specific gravity of the potential material there is supposed to make for poetry of universal significance. Talent may also help.

Writers and poets in the countries which have formed from the six federal republics of the former Yugoslavia have found neither solace nor sure footing in the provincial and parochial. Yugoslavia may have been yet another disastrous consequence of the Versailles treaty but it enabled Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Ivan Lalić and Vasko Popa to emerge as European writers, rather than interesting talents from tiny Ruritanian states whose languages were too insignificant to translate well. Without intending any disrespect to Slovenian, Macedonian and the Albanian spoken in Kosovo, Yugoslavia’s lingua franca of Serbo-Croat with its three dialects gained its writers an international audience. In Writing Europe, a series of essays by European writers from thirty-three different countries published by the Central European University Press, Dubravka Ugresić charts her progress from Yugoslav passport, through Croatian passport (‘the hardness of its cover reminded one of the old Soviet pass for the Lenin library’), to a Dutch passport holder. Seeing herself as coming from the periphery of Europe she rejects the identity tag of nationality as opening ‘the way to reading into a text something that is not there’. Aleš Debeljak, a poet from Slovenia, rejects both the provincial and parochial, castigating ‘nostalgic leftists’ with their ‘mistaken concept of nations outside history’ as ‘obnoxiously patronizing’. His own standpoint is unequivocal, ‘Not unlike many other poets, I imagine that poetry is my true motherland’. The Serbian novelist and diplomat, Dragan Velikić, is similarly unambiguous:

In my case it is simply a fact that I was born a Serb in Belgrade and grew up in the Croatian city of Pula on the Mediterranean coast. These facts exist as no more than a way of entering literature, first as a reader, ultimately as a writer.

In Serbia the sole survivor of the triumvirate (Popa, Lalić and Pavlović) who renovated technique, imagery and subject matter in Serbian poetry in the early 1950s is Miodrag Pavlović (born 1928). Like Ugresić, Debeljak and Velikić his outlook is cosmopolitan and he divides his time between Belgrade and Germany, where he has a family and where he has received awards for his poetry and fiction. Unlike Popa and Lalić his international reputation has not enjoyed the benefit of publication by a major English language publisher, although chapbooks have appeared in Canada and the late Bernard Johnson translated a selection of the best of his poems for a small press in Britain. His poetry draws on local myth, on Serbia’s historical connections with Greece, the Byzantine Empire and European culture.

The last verse of his poem, ‘Odysseus on Circe’s Island’, could describe the bind in which contemporary Serbian poetry finds itself:

I do not know when we will depart from this era
Circe is out of spells, infertile, stupid,
And she is set on holding us fast on the island,
We are bewildered pigs
Under whom there is an irresolute ship.

(translated Nenad Aleksić and James Sutherland-Smith)

In the 1990s many Serbian poets, particularly those in the Serbian Writers’ Association, adopted a pacifist line with regard to the Balkan wars but found themselves in unhappy agreement with Slobodan Milošević with regard to the retention of Kosovo as part of Serbia. Moral and artistic confusion were the inevitable consequence. The International Meeting of Writers in Belgrade, which was once a major Balkan literary event along with the festivals at Struga in Macedonia and Vilenica in Slovenia and which was host to Brodsky, Gascoyne, Ginsberg, Grass, Graves, Juhasz, Pilinszky, Rozewicz, Stanescu, and Updike among others in the 1970s and 1980s, continues but with some rather minor figures as international guests. As one such minor figure, I was a guest at the International Meeting of Writers for five years running. The format was the same while the meeting was run by the late Moma Dimić, who talked fondly of his meeting with Robert Graves. Moma was taken by cancer, the seemingly high incidence of which in Belgrade is blamed on NATO’s use of depleted uranium. This hearsay and the loss of Kosovo trouble the imagination of the writers that frequent the Association. The International meetings include poets and prose writers from some of the other parts of the former Yugoslavia although Croatia and Slovenia are conspicuous by their absence. Poets come from Bosnia (mostly the Serb Republic entity), Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo. There are numerous readings devoted to these as well as the readings for the three or four star guest nations of the year. There are two plenary readings of interminable length where all the poets, the prose writers being excluded, get to read a poem. The first of these is held in the open air in Skardalja, the bohemian street in Belgrade, There is a larger-than-life sculpture of the romantic poet, Djura Jakšić (1832–1878), beside which a motley international crew of middle-aged mostly male scruffs with the occasional ageing dandy intone into a hand-held microphone. Sometimes, tourists gaze open-mouthed perhaps wondering if this is yet another demonstration by a minor political party, especially when ethnic Serb poets from Kosovo recite to great applause. The second plenary is more formal, being held in the auditorium in the Kolarac building on Studentsky trg. Foreign poets read their poem in the original and then a distinguished actor or actress reads a translation. Three hours is an average running time for this reading.

Poetry in Serbia has managed to stay healthy despite the Serbian Association of Writers. Strong independent poets, particularly women poets, are at work outside its improvisations and, so I am informed, petty malpractices. Ivana Milankova, who makes a living as a teacher of English in a vocational school, worked in the 1980s with Allen Ginsberg at workshops in America and her poetry, like that of many Serbs draws on classical myth and a mystical apprehension of the world:

I am prepared to still my hands and close my eyes,
prepared to surrender to soul, to vanish into my other self
and for the first time be deep and white.

(‘Hadrian, To Sense and Form’ translated Zorica Petrović
and James Sutherland-Smith)

Radmila Lazić, who was a professional nurse and is now a literary editor and active in feminist causes, has cut through the Gordian knot of Serbian poets’ preoccupation with history and myth and writes very directly about human relationships. She continues a tradition of realism best exemplified by Aleksandar Ristović (1933–1994). Charles Simic’s translations of Ristović have appeared in The Devil’s Lunch (Faber and Faber) and Ristović comes across as very much a rural realist whose anecdotal opening lines flow into the fantastical in a manner that recalls the celebrated naïve painters of the village of Kovacevic in the Vojvodina region of Serbia. There is a splendid section in the book set in wooden privies inhabited by various mordant voices. Lazić, in contrast, with whom I gave possibly the last poetry reading on British Council premises in Belgrade, is an urban realist. A witty and raunchy selection, A Wake for the Living (Bloodaxe), translated again by Charles Simic, celebrates middle-aged sexual passion and tristesse in the most candid of terms. Unlike Ristović, whose work can sound prosy at times, Lazić has a strong lyrical gift and when this is combined with her candour the effect is startling:

My skin is velvet on the inside,
Like iris.
Smell. Taste.

Although the content of their work could not be more different, Lazić and Milankova have great skill with language. Unlike the Slovak poets that I’ve translated, where the regular syllable-timed intonation tends to avoid alliteration, their work crackles with word play even to the extent of paronomasia, that verbal ornament delighted in by Geoffrey Hill. A small example from Lazić may indicate just how well these two poets can do the business. The italics are mine.

On me ispi kao flašu piva
A moja ljubav se istopi

(He drank me like a bottle of beer
And my love melted)

Both poets offer strong themes and intricately wrought verbal textures, which, away from the shabby purlieus of the Writers’ Association, indicate that the modern traditions of Serbian poetry continue and promise much once an international audience can disentangle its opinions of Serbia from recent history.